Technology

Criminals will soon realize a single flying gadget won’t help them so much and will be drawn into a drone arms race requiring each side to ramp up their drone numbers in order to win any encounter.

Moreover, once criminals discover the drone is a near-perfect murder weapon, they will start to invest in these devices and subsequently pull off murders without getting caught. Once again, police will have to counter with more drones which are constantly surveilling the air.

Finally, many of the drone-based murders will likely take place as night as these devices have night-vision and humans do not.

The largest consumer breach of all time - until now comes to us courtesy of Equifax. Americans think criminal hacking is the greatest technology risk to their health, safety and prosperity and they are right. What makes this breach so bad is this hack of the personally identifiable information (PII) of 143 million people will result in breaches related to this information for years - potentially decades to come.

In real-world terms, your bank and most other organizations you do business with use certain information to ensure you are you when you call or interact with them online. This information for over one-hundred-million of us is now out in the open.

If this news isn't bad enough, there are countless Equifax phishing scams to look out for now as well.

Earlier today we discussed how some years back IMS provided a platform for carriers to roll out applications. The industry discussed the concept for a number of years – magazines, associations and events sprung up to support carrier efforts but the market never happened the way anyone thought it would. This was in-part because Apple rolled out an App Store and then Google followed and developers didn’t need to work with carriers. It was much faster to integrate with the hardware in the hands of the consumer.

"The revolution and evolution of the golden age of entertainment is happening right now," according to Giovanni Punzo the CEO of Streann Media. The company touts itself as the multiscreen next-generation monetization platform for delivering linear TV, VoD and proprietary
interactive services to end-users anytime and anywhere.

The idea behind the platform is fairly simple - allow customers to provide Netflix-like services with localized content. The solution has a built-in ad platform, app editor builder and allows the full distribution and monetization of content.

In addition, the company has a provisional patent on a new way to show video ads - they can be seen in split screen. This is a replacement of the pre-roll which many people including us have grown tired of.

The Miami based company is doing very well in the Latin America market and its HQ in Miami likely doesn't hurt.

Enterprises continue to add applications, infrastructure and devices and quite often, the siloed nature of of business means various divisions don't talk to each other in a manner which allows the organization to optimize problem resolution. Even when the divisions do cooperate, the technology doesn't speak the same language. If digital transformation is the goal of business in this decade and beyond, can it be achieved if an organization doesn't have the ability to manage all of its technology efficiently?

FixStream is an operational intelligence and visualization platform which solves these problems for your company. They were recently named a "Cool" vendor by Gartner in Algorithmic IT Operations (AIOps).

The iPhone X is priced at $1,000 which is the first time a mainstream phone has an entry-level price with four-digits in it.

This led to weeks of media pundits explaining to us that $1,000 is a major milestone in pricing and that phone users will be divided into haves and have nots. Other articles explained what a big deal this extra digit is and how it changes everything and other alarmist headlines and story angles which seemed to try to tie into a theme of income inequality.

It's not surprising actually as every story now seems to be divided along political lines.

Here is what no other outlet besides us explained to you.

People who can afford an $800 phone can generally afford a $1,000 phone. This is especially true as via financing, the price difference will be about $3-$4 per month to upgrade from an iPhone 8 Plus to an iPhone X.

We explained this quite clearly a few days ago and now, as the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have been released, the lines outside Apple stores aren't what people were expecting. Reporters who for some reason did not read our post and were subsequently uninformed, said customers were "missing."

Of course our readers were better informed than most.

People are gravitating toward the iPhone X not only because it is the best phone Apple makes but because it has a screen larger than the iPhone 8 Plus in the form factor of the iPhone 8.

To compete effectively with Apple, Google needs to evolve how it does business. The most important area Google needs to worry about is the Android experience versus the one Apple provides. Apple does its very best to update the operating systems on even its most obsolete phones - ones going back years like the iPhone 5s. Android devices on the other hand seem to be designed to last a year or two - after that, depending on your phone, you're out of luck.

We were very happy to be chosen as a top ten wearable tech expert by Nex Band who asked us for the killer apps in this exciting field. If you want know my predictions and some of the others, feel free to read the whole post.

OK, if you read this far - maybe below the fold (the part of the screen you have to scroll to read - term comes from the days of the newspaper), depending on the resolution of your screen, you deserve to see my predictions without clicking. Still, please check out the original post for all the predictions.

There will be two killer apps for mobile in the foreseeable future. One is glasses-based and will be augmented-reality related.

Some time back we were fortunate enough to attend a breakfast meeting with Jack Welch in Stamford Connecticut. At the time, the Palm 7 was all the rage to give you an idea of how far back we're going in time.

Jack said two things which stood out in our minds.

A Palm 7 uses as much energy as a refrigerator when you take into account the servers it accesses

Chinese light bulb competition is brutal

On this second point, GE has turned to Apple's playbook of vertical integration to get around the problem of commoditization of their market. Instead of fighting the no-name brands head-on, the company has gone upmarket and sells a $200 C by GE Sol Lamp which includes the Amazon Alexa voice assistant.

Yes, you can assemble something similar by buying an Echo Dot from Amazon and some Philips Hue lights but this misses the point of the elegant simplicity of the Sol which is a piece of art in and of itself.

This new lamp C by GE Sol is part of the GE Lighting portfolio and was designed by Richard Clarkson. It not only works with voice commands but also via an iOS and Android app.

Here are some other features of this lamp:

Five Different White Lights: From crisp energizing light to help you stay alert in the office to soft, relaxing light to help you unwind in the family room, Sol has five white tunable light options for your control.